When you make music, you're in really direct contact with your fans out there, so you hear all kinds of stories.
It's not like I'm hanging out at shopping malls or going to celebrity golf tournaments. I'm so in my own little world. I got my dog, my music, my brother, a couple of friends.
Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're send...
An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
It's kind of hard to get deep with Rodgers and Hammerstein. I can't think of a moral in the music - it's just fun.
The hairs stand up on the back of my neck at certain music.
I'm still getting thrilled with music even after 40 years of doing it professionally.
Old music is the same as new music - it's just a different way of delivering it.
But the idea of taking things and mixing them together is what I do in my music. I take hip-hop, R&B, pop, dance, funk and soul and mix it all together to get my own sound.
If anyone can figure out how to balance my celebrity and my dual careers in music and film, it's me. I don't feel frightened; I feel challenged.
I loved the last album, and it was one hundred percent me. But this is like me two years later, who understands a little bit more about music and understands a little bit more about making an album. I wrote a lot more.
Right now music is more my outlet than acting, but I'm waiting for that one satisfying role.
Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of m...
Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.
'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontan...
I don't actually listen to much music since I need quiet to work.
Music is the medicine of the mind.
In the 1970s, for all the Stevie Wonders, I'm sure there were five artists that were making forgettable music.
I'm trying to be me and embrace all the parts of me that have grown up, listened to more music and soaked up more influences.
Sometimes there's that perfect moment when the crowd, the music, the energy of the room come together in a way that brings me to tears.
Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.
